Design

All too often, the CSS for major (and minor) websites is a textbook case of code bloat and redundancy, with lines of code that boast unnecessary use of qualifier elements, overly specific selectors from unnecessarily long selector chains, overdependence on descendent selectors when other selectors would be more appropriate, and the inappropriate or unnecessary use of !important. We’ll show you better ways in the following article…

Did your muses sneak out the back-door without even leaving a message on the bathroom mirror? Didn’t you just have this wonderful idea for this next web project? No? I thought so. When the only thing running properly is your nose and the only sparks flying burn your skin, it is high time you visited Niice.co. This new search engine is here to serve you inspiration in packages tailored to your needs.

We have been introducing you to placeholder services frequently. This new app by the name of uiFaces, that we want to show you today, does not stand in line, though. It covers a rather unique aspect of modern design, the integration of Social Media. With uiFaces you can easily integrate social network areas into your design mock-ups. With its ample flexibility, uiFaces covers any use-case.

Corporate Design (CD) as a subset of the wider Corporate Identity determines how a company will be perceived in the public eye. Its logo or elements from it make up the outward appearance. Any means of communication, be it business cards or stationery and any means of advertising, such as flyers, brochure and of course digital representations in the form of a website or – growing more and more popular – apps derives from it.

Infographics are popular. They help reduce complex coherences to simplified illustrations. Information gets visualized. The best infographics are self-explanatory, needing almost no text at all. A picture is worth a thousand words, they say. And it’s true. In this collection, we share with you 40 entertaining infographics on popular topics from around the net. If you are a programmer, illustrator, designer or nerd of any other type, you’ll most likely find at least the majority of these informative pieces interesting. If you don’t like the content, probably you’ll be inspired by the way, the graphic has been done.

Traditionally, matte paintings stem from the movie industry. Used as extensions of a film setting, they provide more depth to the whole scene and removing the limitations of a studio location. Today, with green and blue screen techiques, these paintings are still in heavy use, while – certainly – digitally created backgrounds took over the heritage from their usually glass-based predecessors. To inspire the Photoshopper in you, we spared no effort and dug up the highest-class and most astonishing matte paintings we were able to come up with.

The classical box model in CSS has never been the most intuitive. Thanks to CSS3, we now have an alternative to consider: {box-sizing:border-box}. This model has lots of advantages, especially when it comes to flexible layouts.

Adobe’s Photoshop still is the market’s most common and most popular choice for professional designers. Besides photography and print design, which Photoshop once got invented for, it is widely used in the designing of websites, too. The last ten years saw the product grow in functionality especially in terms of web design features. A large part of the world’s most successful websites started as a draft in Adobe’s market leader. Photoshop Etiquette is a new and free service, aiming at beginners in web design with Photoshop. It offers the absolute basics and makes for a very good starting point.

Best practices of defining font sizes are discussed throughout the web since its inception. Besides the traditional candidates, such as px, em and %, rem represents a fairly new alternative, taking the best of the other units and combining them into one.

Tooltips in HTML pages general do not need any effort from a developer’s side, as long as they put proper title attributes to their elements. The title is then used for showing the tooltip, but also for other things, such as providing a screen reader with proper content. Speaking of the use case of tooltips, the visual presentation depends on the browser your site gets visited with. Developers with the need for more control turned to JavaScript bases solutions years ago. Kashagra Gour created Hint.css, which proves as a decent alternative, based completely on CSS and HTML.